


Finding Anna

by NightsMistress



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-18 02:16:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2331494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They don't live in a fairy tale, but Elsa thinks this might be the beginning of her happy ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Finding Anna

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rosabelle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosabelle/gifts).



> My thanks to Morbane, for both the beta and the cheerleading. This story wouldn't have been finished without you.

It’s been a few weeks since Anna thawed Arendelle with an act of true love, and Elsa still does not know how to make amends. Anna seems to be content with what they have, but Elsa wants to make it a true happy ending for her. It doesn’t help that Elsa isn’t quite sure what a happy ending should look like, and where she would belong in one. Happy endings belong in stories, and and this story has a queen who froze her kingdom and even after an act of true love, wears her gloves sometimes when she is anxious and scared.

Perhaps things might be easier had Elsa enjoyed reading fairy tales as a child. She would slip into the library while everyone was asleep and make notes of what books were missing, so she could read them after Anna had. When they returned, well loved and smeared with chocolate and icing, Elsa would read them to see what Anna enjoyed about them. She didn’t understand then, because she couldn’t see herself in the plucky heroine standing up against the odds. She thinks she might now. Anna does make a very good fairy tale heroine.

Elsa prefers political treatises, because they deal with facts that she can understand easily. There is still so much to learn about being the queen, and the thought of making more mistakes terrifies her. It’s peculiarly reassuring that after she returns the books to their library, they’re missing the following day and come back a few weeks later, much more worn than when Elsa read them. If Elsa makes another colossal mistake, Anna will be ready. Knowing that helps.

Anna wears gloves now to complement Elsa’s. She knows that Anna is learning to act with more decorum when she has to so that she can help Elsa with court. She knows that Anna is trying so very hard to understand Elsa, and Elsa knows that she has not tried to do the same. 

Finally, she gathers her courage and visits the library during the day. Anna is there, as expected, making faces at the books as if she’s in an argument with them and losing — possible, for Anna — Elsa watches as Anna screws up her face and flicks one on the spine with her right index finger.

“I’ll get you next time,” she says sternly. “You and your foot crushing ways.” True enough, there is a bruise blossoming on Anna’s right foot. Elsa wonders, for not the first time, why Anna doesn’t wear enclosed shoes. Anna’s slippers do nothing to protect her feet from falling objects.

“Is everything all right?” Elsa says instead, and Anna jumps, dropping the book she’s holding in her other hand. Elsa freezes it in mid air with a stream of ice, before it falls on Anna’s other foot.

“Oh, that’s handy!” Anna says, beaming. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Elsa says, using the ice stream to guide the book down to a table. “I have a full dancing card for you. You can’t get out of it that easily.” 

“On second thought, can you let the book fall on me?” Anna says quickly. “You know that Duke Bucket can’t dance, even if he thinks otherwise. Why do we even have so many dances now? And why do I have to dance with all of the guests? Can’t you do it?”

“No,” Elsa says. “I’m not a good dancer.” It is more that Elsa doesn’t enjoy dancing. Anna does, however, and if she dances with all the guests of honour first, then she’s free to dance with the younger men without anyone assuming that she’s foreshadowing an engagement. Anna doesn’t need to think about these things, because Elsa does. 

Anna’s response is a heartfelt moan. “Okay, I’ll do it. But only because it’s you and you owe me.”

“I do,” Elsa says simply, and Anna blushes. “But, I didn’t come to discuss that. Can we go somewhere to talk?”

“I thought something was wrong,” Anna says. “And we had a whole week without something going wrong. Is it Hans?”

“No, I haven’t heard anything from him since the ship sailed, and I think we would,,” Elsa says quickly, seeing the way that Anna bites her lip. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

Anna breathes a sigh of relief. “You had me worried there! I thought it was something bad! Like … we’re about to be invaded by an angry army of snowmen! Or maybe not an army of invading _snowmen_ , because if it were snowmen you could go whoosh and get rid of them, and that wouldn’t be very scary at all.”

“No, it’s nothing like that,” Elsa says. She adds, trying to cut Anna’s rambling off before it gets too convoluted, “Besides, what if I’m the one controlling the snowmen?”

“You’d have a good reason,” Anna says easily. “You always do. And if you didn’t, you’d think of one. But that’s not important: where should we go for this talk?

“You choose.”

“Let’s go to the painting room!” Anna suggests, and then after a moment frowns. Elsa has no idea where that is, and judging from Anna’s sheepish grin that confusion must be obvious. “You … do know where the painting room is, right?”

“No,” Elsa admits, her mouth twisting in a wry smile. “It wasn’t somewhere I needed to go before.”

“Oh! Of course! I should have thought,” Anna says, tripping over her words in her haste to get them out. “It’s not that big a deal really — I just thought it’d be nice to go there and talk to the paintings afterward, but it’s stupid. I’m stupid for thinking about it. Don’t worry!” She ducks her head and shrugs. “We can go somewhere better.” 

“I never said it was bad,” Elsa says. She takes a moment to think about what she needs to say next. She’s familiar with what to say to servants and has a script for that, but that won’t work for Anna. “Can you show me?”

“Like a tour?” Anna beams. She seems utterly unaware of the ridiculousness of a queen not knowing her own castle. Once, Elsa resented Anna’s blithely oblivious nature. Now, watching Anna bounce lightly on the balls of her feet, Elsa regrets all the time that she spent resenting Anna in the first place.

“What’s wrong?” Anna says, frowning. “Is there something on my face?”

“No,” Elsa says quickly. “I was just thinking.”

“Really? We should go, I’ll show you some neat places along the way.” Anna takes Elsa’s hand. It’s still a novelty to feel someone else’s hand in her own, and Anna’s grip is secure in Elsa’s. Most of the servants, even the ones that Elsa has known since she was a little girl, still flinch away when Elsa reaches out to them. She’s not surprised. A queen wielding the power of ice is one thing when there is a rogue prince’s plans to foil. It’s quite different when it’s simply a matter of steadying someone on the stairs.

“First up,” Anna says, gesturing expansively with her free hand. “The library!”

Elsa ducks her head to hide a smile.

“Now you might look at this place and go ‘oh, it’s a bunch of books’ and you’d be right! But it’s so much more than that. If you play hide and seek in here, it takes forever for someone to find you. I know for a fact!”

“Whom were you playing hide and seek with?” Elsa says. She expects Anna to say that she was playing with the servants’ children or something similar.

“Oh, my imaginary friends,” Anna says with a shrug. “They were the _best_ at hiding.”

“I see,” Elsa says. She really does, which makes it worse.

“It’s okay, I haven’t seen Lulu and Rudolf in _years_ ,” Anna goes on cheerfully. “But if you want a good hiding place, the geography section is really cluttered. I bet if you hid there, no one would find you for days!” She then makes a face at Elsa. “Only _don’t_ do that because I would make a terrible Queen.”

“I’m sure you’d be fine,” Elsa says. After all, Elsa does know what Anna’s other reading material is. Anna might not like being Queen, but Elsa has made Anna the heir for a reason. “What’s next?”

“The stairs,” Anna declares. Anna’s hand is warm in Elsa’s as she pulls her to and down the stairs, not quite stumbling but it’s honestly a near thing. It reminds Elsa a little of how their parents would hold Elsa’s hand when they went outside, before Elsa accidentally froze Anna’s head. It doesn’t hurt, but it does remind Elsa that she does miss her parents. She thinks of them and how they would tell the girls to slow down, for fear of running into one of their subjects. Then she chooses to ignore the internalised voice of their parents. This is _her_ castle and she can be undignified in her own home.

“Normally I’d slide down the bannister but that’s something you have to learn to do and you haven’t learned that yet,” Anna says as they go down, her spare hand gesturing at the stairs. “Not that it’s hard! You’d be great at it! You’re great at everything. But I totally understand if you don’t want to do it because whoa, those heels! I do _not_ know how you don’t break an ankle in those.”

Elsa looks down at her feet and raises her eyebrows. Her heels are quite sensible, only a few inches in height, and only look high in comparison to Anna’s flat soles. She keeps to herself the observation that after wearing heels to scale a mountain everything else is easy.

“It just takes practice,” she says instead. “I’ll show you if you like.”

“Oh no no no, it’s fine,” Anna says, precariously balanced on one step in such a way that if a draft were to blow at that exact moment she would tumble down. “And we take a left … _here_!” She opens the door with a flourish.

It is a powder room, much like the other four on the ground floor. Elsa, puzzled, glances over the marble benchtop and sink, looking for a clue as to what Anna wants her to see. She turns to Anna for explanation.

“You never know when you might need to powder your nose,” Anna says. “Or find out if you have asparagus in your teeth. That’s never a good look.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Elsa says.

“Not that you’d have any problem with that, of course!” Anna says quickly. “But someone _else_ might and now you know where they can go. For next time.”

“I won’t tell anyone if you’re hiding in here from Duke Bucket,” Elsa says, and Anna sighs.

“Who pronounces ‘Bucket’ like ‘Bouquet’, anyway?” she says, closing the door. “But this powder room is special, because it’s the one closest to the ballroom.”

Elsa does know this, but gestures for Anna to continue as they walk down the corridor to where Elsa is pretty sure the ballroom is located.

“You would think it would be _crazy_ busy but at your coronation? Hardly _anyone_ went here! Which is good because I had a stash of chocolate here _just in case_ and someone might have gotten hungry and eaten it.”

“Anna, you’re the princess,” Elsa says. “You don’t have to hide chocolate. You can just ask for it.”

“I can?” Anna says. “Really?”

“Of course,” Elsa says. “You’re my sister, and this is your castle. You don’t have to sneak around like that.”

“Oookay,” Anna says. “I didn’t know it was that big a deal. Besides, it’s fun pretending to be the Super Spy of Arendelle!”

“The … super spy?” Elsa says.

“Yes! Clumsy princess by day, graceful scaler of roofs by night!” Anna strikes a pose and then laughs at herself. “Of course, it’s just my imagination, but it’s fun anyway.”

Elsa doesn’t tell Anna that they already have spies, because Anna would want to know who they were and whether she could be a part time spy. 

“Up here’s the ballroom, isn’t it?” Elsa says instead.

“Yeah, it looks so much bigger without all the people in it. I practice dancing there with Sir Broom.”

Elsa is familiar with most of the knights of Arendelle and she isn’t familiar with a Sir Broom. 

“Has he been a knight for very long?” she asks politely.

Anna snickers. “Sorry, sorry!” she says as Elsa frowns. “He’s a broom. An actual broom.”

“Do you … want a dance instructor?” Elsa says carefully. “We can get one for you.”

“Oh, no, don’t go to any trouble,” Anna says with a wave of her hand. “What Sir Broom lacks for conversation he more than makes up for by not having feet to step on.”

“It’s no trouble at all,” Elsa says. “Really. But if you don’t want one, that’s fine.”

“Sir Broom and I have a _history_ ,” Anna says. “He won’t tell anyone about how I used to trip over and I won’t tell anyone about his bald spot.”

“Are you sure he’s not a mop?” Elsa says.

“Yes! Mostly. Kind of. Honestly, I don’t know,” Anna says. “But Sir Broom has a better ring to it.”

“He does sound like a mop,” Elsa says.

“I can show you him later and we can decide,” Anna says. “But he’s on the other side of the castle, and we’re almost at the painting gallery. I’ll show you him later.”

“Promise?” Elsa teases and is surprised when Anna says, in all seriousness, that she does.

They walk silently to the painting room, or at least at first. Elsa uses the time to think about what it is she wants to say to Anna, rehearsing it in her head until it sounds right to her ear. It takes her a minute to realise that Anna is humming under her breath. It’s a nice tune, but one that she doesn’t recognise. Perhaps her friend, Kristoff, taught it to her? 

“And our final destination!” Anna announces, interrupting Elsa’s thoughts. “The painting room!”

The painting room is a long corridor interrupted occasionally by suits of armor wearing the armor of famous Arendelle warriors and chairs, with paintings depicting various scenes of Arendelle history hung on the walls. They’re not the only ones there: sitting under a little snowcloud and gazing up at the oil painting of Arendelle’s patron saint, Saint Astrid of the Snows, is Olaf. “I love it,” he breathes to himself. “It’s so pretty.”

“Hi Olaf,” Anna says, and Olaf turns around.

“Hello!” he carols. “Are you here to see Astrid too? The red snow is so pretty.”

“Um, no,” Anna says.

“Does he know that that’s blood?” Elsa whispers to Anna.

Anna scowls at her. “You can’t tell him.”

“I won’t,” Elsa says.

“Are you two conspiring?” Olaf says loudly. “Is there something I can help with?”

“Uh, sure!” Anna says. “We’re having a secret sister talk, so can you stand guard?” She turns to Elsa. “Is that okay?”

“It’s okay,” Elsa says. It is okay. It is fitting. Olaf was there when they were first separated by magic, and so he should be there when they try to be friends as well as sisters again.

“I will guard like I have never guarded before,” Olaf says, then ruins the moment by adding. “I haven’t guarded anyone before! This is so exciting!”

The two girls watch Olaf settle into place, feet apart and fists up in what only he thinks is a threatening manner. 

“He means well,” Anna says fondly the painting of Joan of Arc. Elsa takes a seat next to her.

“I know,” Elsa says, envying Anna’s unconscious self-assurance as she slouches into the back of the chair.

“So what’s up?”

Elsa takes a breath, holds it, and then lets it go before speaking. “I didn’t understand how lonely you were,” Elsa says. “I don’t understand why Mother and Father didn’t let you outside to play.”

“I wouldn’t have wanted to anyway,” Anna says, as if it is the most obvious thing in the world. “Why would I want to go out if you weren’t there with me?”

“That’s not the point,” Elsa says, frowning. “You should have been _able_ to. You deserved better than a lonely castle with no-one to talk to.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Anna says. “I have you now. And now that the castle gates are open, there’ll be others.”

“And Kristoff?”

“Kristoff’s not really a _friend_ ,” Anna says, all but squirming, to Elsa’s delight. Then, trying for dignity, she adds, “But the gates are open to him too.” The effect is ruined by her incandescent blush, but Elsa gives her credit for trying.

“Are they? Maybe I should talk to him and make sure his intentions are honourable.”

“ _Elsa_ …” Anna moans. “Please don’t. We’re just … it’s not like that. He’s very nice. Perfectly nice.”

Elsa laughs, and after a moment Anna does as well.

“I’ve wanted to spend time with you like this for so long,” Elsa says finally.

“You can keep doing it if you like,” Anna says, trying to be gracious despite her flushed cheeks. “But only because you’re my sister.”

“Thank you,” Elsa says. “I’ll try harder to be your friend as well as your sister.”

“Pinkie swear?” Anna says. 

The two girls link pinkie fingers and share a smile.

“Ooh!” Olaf carols from the door. “Can I join in?”

“Sure!” Anna says.

“Of course,” Elsa says, and doesn’t hide her smile as Olaf races over to join in.

Olaf’s ‘hand’ is cold as it wraps around Elsa’s and Anna’s fingers, but Elsa wouldn’t have it any other way.


End file.
